The System Shock Remake Is Now Expected In 2020

The Kickstarted remake of the original System Shock designed for today's generation of gaming has been delayed. The project was originally supposed to be a small project that remade the original game and would come out for home consoles and PC, and now it's been pushed to 2020.

PC Gamer is reporting that during this year's Game Developers Conference, Nightdive Studios business development director, Larry Kuperman,, explained to them exactly where the project stands and what the new target date for release is after retooling the development roadmap and re-organizing where the studio needed to be to get the remake of System Shock out the door, saying...

Our intention is to ship exactly the game that was promised, with as much of the features that were promised as we can, in a timeframe that will get it out as fast as we can. Our expectation is probably Q1 of 2020.

The game was originally supposed to be out by late 2017 in December, but ended up encountering development delays and was then put on hiatus. It was first built in the Unity 3D game engine and would have been a carbon copy of the original 1994 release from Looking Glass Studios for PC, just with improved graphics, enhanced lighting, a remastered version of the original soundtrack, and optimized playability designed for today's generation of gaming. In a way, the System Shock Remake was supposed to be just like the Shadow of the Colossus remake that recently came out for the PlayStation 4, which was originally based on the PS2 game that came out 13 years ago in 2005.

However, Kick explained to PC Gamer that the project got out of hand and the team began expanding the scope of the project with feature creep.

The money accrued through the crowdfunding phase was phased out and the game was nowhere near complete. Worse yet is that the System Shock remake ended up getting retooled under the Unreal Engine 4, requiring the team to start from scratch.

According to PC Gamer, the team is sticking with the Unreal Engine 4, but had to gut and practically restart to get back on track to what was originally intended with the game. So now the basics are put back into place and the team is expected to finish the System Shock remake by the first quarter of 2020, which is about three years off from what was originally intended.

A lot of the Kickstarter backers are not happy with the turn of events and have expressed a lot of disdain for the way things have turned out, especially since the only thing that backers wanted was the original System Shock but with the bells and whistles of today's generation of playability and graphical enhancements.

Ultimately this puts a huge damper on the reputation of Nightdive Studios, and the small outfit will only be able to redeem its reputation by putting out an amazing remake of the game and doing so in a timely enough manner. Even then, it's unlikely that this massive blunder will go unnoticed throughout the rest of Nightdive's tenure on the market.